As my colleague from Elmwood--Transcona said, the Liberals are a little slow, so let me go over the numbers again.
Let us just go back to this current fiscal year when we heard the government had predicted $1.9 in surplus. It turned out to be $9.1 billion. He sort of reversed the numbers, but it was just a little change. For one year, one could excuse it and say that it was an oversight. However, let us go back over the last decade. I will give the following statistics to the member.
Over the last 10 fiscal years, the government has been in error an average of 203.9% a year. I do not think that is 1% or 2% but rather it is an over 200% error. Expressed as a percentage of the total budgetary projection, the Liberals have been off on their projections by 67% over the last 10 fiscal years.
The government has been out $86 billion. That money has been automatically put against the debt as opposed to being spent according to a formula on which Parliament agrees on and into which Canadians have had some input. That is exactly what we are asking for today, a chance to have a democratic participatory process around the money that is available, not to have the government play games and hide the money that belongs to Canadians.
The member claims that all the money went to important issues like health and education, et cetera. Why, for the first time since the 1950s, are workers taking home less than half of the economic pie they produce? That compares to a historical peak of 57% in 1976. “More than any other single indicator, this epochal decline in labour's share of GDP describes the cumulative impact of a quarter-century of neo-conservatism”. That comes from Jim Stanford, who by the way the Minister of Finance has acknowledged as someone quite credible when it comes to accurate forecasting. Jim Stanford, the CCPA and the alternative federal budget folks, have been the only group of economists who have been accurate in their forecasting. I would suggest that if the member wants to have more accurate forecasting, he should rely on the people who have been producing accurate numbers.